I’ve recently made a few changes to dotTech and would greatly appreciate any and all feedback you all have.

Content Changes

A few months ago I decided to make a major change in what dotTech covers. Instead of just doing reviews and tips and tricks, dotTech started posting interesting tidbits on the happenings of the tech world. While some dotTechies were resistant to changes, eventually many people can to enjoy the new articles. However, last week I realized dotTech’s core value is providing reviews and recommendation on software and apps. Combine that with the fact that there is only so much interesting tech news that happens in a day, I decided to try to find a balance between news and reviews. As such, as some of you may have noticed over the past few days, dotTech is now going to be posting three reviews on Windows, Android, iPhone, iPad, Mac OS X, and Chrome/Firefox/Internet Explorer/Opera apps and programs each day.

With these reviews we have decided to not write extremely long articles that no one reads (yes, I know some people read the title and skip to the download link) and not write extremely short articles that are nothing more than infomercials. Rather, we want to find the perfect balance between too much information and too little information; our goal is to provide you with all the necessary knowledge (major pros and major cons) of an app/software so you can make an informed decision without having to spend an hour reading each article. Please do let us know how we are doing by posting a comment[1] below.

Now just because we spending more time reviewing software does not mean we will completely ignore tech news. While we will try to no longer writer those annoyingly useless “XXX has released XXX” type articles, we will still continue to write tech news. The only difference is we will now try to focus on only the most interesting news of the day rather than post whatever we read, like some blogs do. Feel free to share your thoughts on how we are handling tech news in the comments below[1], too.

Other Changes

I spend most of the day Friday making back-end changes to dotTech, which is actually why you saw me post no news articles on Friday — I was busy polishing the beloved machine that holds this awesome blog. (Yes, I will never shy away from praising dotTech.) One of the major changes I made was simply the URL for dotTech posts. Now URLs will no longer say the category that which the article belongs to, rather only showing its unique identified and the name of the article. Why did I do this? For two reasons.

Firstly, saying the category name was redundant seeing as the title is already there, and the category actually caused confusion among some readers when an article would be categorized in more than one category yet the URL only showed one category. Secondly, and more importantly, many users have been asking me to put the operating system tag (e.g. [Android]) at the beginning of article titles as opposed to the end. Until now I resisted this request for SEO purposes but with the removal of category name from URLs, I have absolute no issue with placing the tags in the beginning and dotTech will do so from now on.

The change in URL comes with one drawback — there might be broken links. So, please, if you ever come across a broken link do report it to me. You can always e-mail me[2] or simply post a comment[1] below.

Aside from changing of URL, I made upgrades and optimizations to dotTech’s server which should — hopefully — make dotTech load faster for everyone. Let me know if this isn’t the case.